One of the most unusual zombie stories I’ve ever read is Scott Edelman’s “What Will Come After,” which I just read as the lead story in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #22 …

“What Will Come After” got under my skin and into my blood faster than any zombie virus ever could. It’s a live human and undead zombie story all mixed together. Actually, it’s more of a meditation on inevitability than anything else. I found it both frail and strong at the same time—all very affective and certainly unforgettable.

A couple of months ago, I announced a competition to blow the top of my head off by creating a short clip based on my Stoker-nominated zombie play “A Plague on Both Your Houses,” with three winners to be unveiled at World Fantasy Con at the end of this month. The clip of no less than three minutes in length can be in any format—live action, animation, marionettes, claymation, kinetic typography, sock puppets—and it’s not too late to submit yours.

So if you’ve been thinking of picking up a Flip cam and giving it a try, check out all the info here. You’ll note that I said entries had to be submitted by this Saturday the 15th, but as I’m the only judge, and it won’t be necessary to coordinate extensive debate, I’ve decided to extend that another 10 days to October 25th, the Tuesday before World Fantasy. So if you’ve been thinking of entering, there’s still time! What else do you have to do the next two weekends?

And just to give you an idea of your competition, check out this ambitious entry from Drake Tucker and his frightening friends.

Just in case you didn’t read my short story “What Will Come After” in my collection of the same name, you’ve got another chance, because it’s now the lead story in Best New Horror 22 from the perceptive editor Stephen Jones. And if the thought of reading me isn’t enough of an impetus to get you to pick up a copy, you’d also get to read my betters, writers like Ramsey Campbell, Joe Lansdale, and Robert Shearman.

My zombie play “A Plague on Both Your Houses“—think Night of the Living Dead crossed with Romeo and Juliet—has never been performed, save for a star-studded reading during the 1998 Stoker Awards weekend. And by performed, I simply mean that since the work was on the final ballot that year, and all nominees got a chance to read a chunk of their work, and my play wouldn’t have been understood if multiple characters had been read in my voice alone, I dragooned a bunch of my friends on stage to read along with me.

Had you been there, you’d have seen Michael Marano, David Honigsberg, Ed Bryant, Nina Kirki Hoffman, Gordon van Gelder, and others (including me!) as zombies. Well, some of us anyway. Some were the last surviving humans on Manhattan Island in a post-apocalyptic future. But I’ve always wanted something more.

And while discussing the piece at Readercon last month—because people have been reading and talking about it again due to its inclusion in my all-zombie collection What Will Come After—I’ve decided to finally make that something more happen.

Here’s where you come in. I’m announcing the creation of the Blow the Top of Scott Edelman’s Head Off Really Cool Zombie Filmmaking Competition to encourage the creation of short videos based on sections of the play, with the winner (as judged by me) receiving $200 and my undying awe. (Zombie awe should always be undying, shouldn’t it?)

I’ve been so busy recently—what with work, overnight visitors in our home nine of the past ten nights, and three barbecues in eight days—that I haven’t really had time to think about the fact that on Sunday at Readercon, I’ll get to see Laird Barron, Stephen Graham Jones, Jeff VanderMeer, or Karen Joy Fowler get stoned during the Shirley Jackson Awards ceremony for having written the Best Single-Author Collection of 2010. (As you can tell, I’m not terribly optimistic about my chances of winning for What Will Come After.)

But today I won something that reminded me of what’s coming up while at the same time putting it all in perspective—I won a reader. And a wildly enthusiastic reader at that, who wrote, not just a review, but a lengthy “unbarred squeeing session.”

I bought the book because I’d enjoyed one of his stories, “The Last Supper”, in a horror anthology I found at Arisia. It’s about the end of the zombie apocalypse. Edelman manages the difficult trick of being gentle and crushingly sad while writing a viewpoint character who has about one thought and two emotions. Chalk up another story for my small set of favorite zombie protagonists. It was enough to get me to buy his collection—all zombies, all the time. Nine pieces, all good, some brilliant. Of the stories, I’d select the title piece and “Live People Don’t Understand” as standouts. …

… as the introduction is keen to point out, Edelman was writing literary zombie mashups long before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies hit the shelves. I’d add that everything in the collection is a heck of a lot better-written and wittier than P&P&Z. Well, comparisons are odorous. These are damn fine stories.

And if you’d like to check out those “damn fine stories” for yourself, remember—now that PS Publishing has put out my collection as an ebook, you can be reading them in minutes. Here’s how.

Whispers was one of the most respected horror magazines of the ’70s and ’80s, and I always hoped I’d someday submit something that would be found acceptable by editor and publisher Stuart David Schiff. Unfortunately, as with so many other wonderful magazines, Whispers ran out of somedays.

The story Stu passed on, “The Man Who Would Be Vampire,” was eventually purchased by Crispin Burnham and published in a 1988 issue of Eldritch Tales.

Sunday at the World Horror Convention began in the middle of the night, which is appropriate, I guess, for a horror con. But the things that went bump in the night weren’t vampires or werewolves, but instead those damned frat boys, who for whatever reason decided to begin moving furniture from one hotel room to another at around 3:45 a.m., drunkenly bumping into walls as they carried box springs while shouting directions at each other. When I phoned the front desk, the immediate answer I got was, “I’m sick of these complaints. I’m calling the PD.” Whether the police ever arrived, and what they might have done when they got there, I have no idea, because I turned up the fan to block the noise and struggled to get back to sleep. Which, after 45 minutes or so, I was finally able to do.

After I woke, packed, and checked out, I headed to the 10:00 a.m. “Zombies Mega-Panel,” a 90-minute celebration of the living dead moderated by Joe McKinney and featuring me, RJ Sevin, Julia Sevin, Joe R. Lansdale, and John Skipp. (And Brian Keene, too, whom we pulled onstage about halfway through.) But before we began, I tossed out a couple of dozen glow-in-the-dark zombie finger puppets to get people in the mood.

It turns out that Lee Thomas also had something planned to get people in the mood—a video which was played before any of us began talking about why we loved zombies so much. Thanks for warming up the crowd, Lee! Check out what we all saw in Austin.

As soon as the panel ended, I ran off with my only willing victim … er, volunteer … Liz Gorinsky, to the Cathedral of Junk, which I already told you about, after which I dropped Liz back at the hotel and headed to the airport … where I discovered the con was not yet over.

I had lunch at the airport branch of the Salt Lick, which as you might expect wasn’t quite as good as its Driftwood branch (no ribs!), but was still some of the best airport food I’ve had in awhile. And then when I wandered toward my gate, I bumped into this motley crew …

That’s Derek Clendenning, Gord Rollo, and Eunice Magill, and since the pic was taken by Michael Kelly, you can see that World Horror was the con which wouldn’t die. I hung out with these guys as long as I could, but eventually I had to board my flight to Dulles. But WHC wasn’t over then either, as I happened to overhear the person in front of me mention the word “horror,” and when I asked, learned he was Henrik Sundqvist, one of the artists who had displayed work in Austin. We chatted a bit, until my exhaustion overtook me (damned frat boys!) and I slept for most of the flight.

And that was my World Horror Con!

Well … there is one more thing I have to tell you about—my Friday night outing to the Rude Mechanicals production of the play “I’ve Never Been So Happy.” But I’ll leave that for another day …

Since I failed to keep up a contemporaneous account of this year’s World Horror Con while attending this year’s World Horror Con, expect there to be many posts over the next week as I play catch-up. I’ve already shared twice about things that occurred on the way to the hotel, but now I’m going to start talking about con itself by posting video of my reading, since there’s no law that says I must write the trip up chronologically.

On Saturday, April 30, 2011, I read my short story “Are We Not a New People?,” which had originally appeared in the anthology Zombie Apocalypse. The faceless woman who introduces me is Martel Sardina. As for what you see me tossing to the audience before I begin, those are glow-in-the-dark zombie finger puppets, some of which I’d already given out before the reading began.

I have long stressed that the most important thing about convention reporting is that it be done while the convention is still going on. In fact, I’ve codified that in Edelman’s Schadenfreude Rule of Convention Reporting, which states that it isn’t enough for me to be having a good time, you must know I’m having that good time and regret not being there to have it with me.

Updating statuses on Twitter and Facebook doesn’t feel sufficient in terms of making you miserable enough to make me happy. I need to post photos, videos, and blog entries. But as far as this year’s World Horror is concerned, I have failed.

I wrote a blog post about getting to the con, but nothing about the con itself, because I was that busy and tired. The half dozen videos I shot haven’t made it to YouTube yet. And I only just now, 24 hours after returning home, got my pics up on Flickr.

Go check them out. And remember, as you can see below—everything is bigger in Texas!

There’ll be more World Horror commentary later—but first I think I need to recover from World Horror!

A collection of zombie stories, with Edelman injecting new life into an old archetype and giving a kick in the pants to those who think zombies are good for nothing except shoot ‘em ups (though those are fun too). What delighted me about this collection was the sheer variety, both thematically and in terms of technical virtuosity, with verse plays, stories within stories, grue playing off against a metaphysical dimension, and reifications of classic literature.